Canada’s Meryeta O’Dine won the bronze medal in her Olympic debut at the Beijing Winter Games in women’s snowboard cross Wednesday.
The 24-year-old from Prince George, B.C., held off Australia’s Belle Brockhoff in the big final to claim a place on the podium.
It marks Canada’s first women’s snowboard cross medal since the 2014 Games in Sochi. “You have to play it patient and really line it up in places that you know that you’re going to pass, and there are some places that I tried to run out a pass and there ended up being either no space or I slowed myself down,” O’Dine said of the tightly-contested final.
Lindsay Jacobellis of the United States won her first gold medal in five Olympic Games, in a redemption story after winning an upset silver at the 2006 Games in Torino and missing out on a medal in every subsequent Olympics until Beijing.